[HN Gopher] Discord is a black hole for information
___________________________________________________________________
Discord is a black hole for information
Author : Prestoon
Score : 483 points
Date : 2022-02-12 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knockout.chat)
(TXT) w3m dump (knockout.chat)
| Arathorn wrote:
| Something we're trying to do about this on the Matrix side is
| MSC2716 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-
| doc/blob/matthew/msc271...) - the ability to import archives of
| existing content into Matrix, and thus 'lock it open' and
| decentralise it for posterity: as long as one of the servers
| participating in that room stays alive (and the room is set up
| with infinite data retention, obviously) then the conversation
| will live on forever. (That MSC is also well worth a look for
| those interested in how Matrix works under the hood; MSC2716 was
| a surprisingly tricky problem to solve but it's basically
| finished now!).
|
| Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into
| Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the
| existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat
| history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting
| paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting
| to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which
| have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as
| much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that
| gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards.
| After all, information longs to be free :)
| low_tech_love wrote:
| "Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an
| issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the
| discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron."
| Nothing to add!
| mitchtbaum wrote:
| Hence the quote, "Issue queue or it didn't happen." That was
| Drupal's idiom and it still applies to projects in general.
|
| > While all of these other communication mechanisms are great,
| esp. for hashing things out more effectively in real time, it's
| absolutely critical that a summary of what was talked about make
| its way back here for the benefit of those who couldn't be there,
| including Google, and yourself 2 weeks later when you totally
| forget what you talked about. :P There needs to be a URL to point
| people at who have questions later on. However. As a text-based
| medium, the issue queues are an ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE medium
| through which to have a heated discussion about whatever. For
| that you turn to one of the others.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/1qz9l9/i_am_angie_w...
| sylware wrote:
| elephant in the room: discord is another set of closed network
| protocols with a lot of centralized/multicast/relay servers. And
| it is free as in free beer: the discord ppl were granted tons of
| money. Where those tons of money do come from? From the usual
| blackrock and vanguard funds or their proxies? This is probably
| public information, but I have not looked into that. If I want to
| interact with ppl on discord servers: either I have to build a
| google(blink/geecko)/apple(webkit) browser (which I don't and
| won't), or use their linux proprietary "app" which expects a
| massive distro with tons of big deps. The steam client is very
| far from expecting as much from a distro than this app, and they
| are both, roughly speaking, packaged/librar-ized google blink
| engines (libcef). Why something that much toxic for internet can
| "succeed" (or make a lot of noise): it is insanely easy to use,
| provides full voice/video calls and more, and is free as in free
| beer (yeah... massive free bandwidth at a worldwide scale!!).
|
| How to do the same with "open and sane protocols" and not force
| ppl to use a google/apple based browser? Well it is super ez: 1 -
| get massive amount (I guess at least as much as the discord guys)
| of funding to make all the servers and bandwidth free as in free
| beer, worldwide. 2 - if you get 1, we'll talk about 2...
| bumblebeast wrote:
| Discord Feels like a modern BBS from the 80's.
|
| .. with annoying notifications
| scrollaway wrote:
| Is there a concrete reason that we can't build a search engine
| for discord public content? Archive it?
|
| We used to do this for IRC as well. Anyone remembers
| https://ibot.rikers.org/?
| tluyben2 wrote:
| It just needs to export to html every 24 hours and dump that on
| a server; then it's indexed by DDG and Google etc. It's not
| like that costs money or anything.
| Prestoon wrote:
| Good idea, and I suppose people wouldn't have a problem
| throwing yet another bot into their server. I'd imagine the
| data it's scraping to be IMMENSE considering Discord saves
| everything.
|
| https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...
| [deleted]
| karlicoss wrote:
| I'm a strong believer in Zulip with respect to a perfect mix
| between instant messaging and actually retaining information
|
| - functionality for a public export (can also restrict to
| specific channels), .e.g. https://leanprover-
| community.github.io/archive/
|
| - in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so
| you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that
| would make it possible to index without setting up a separate
| archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172
|
| - messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random
| obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)
|
| - you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where
| search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you
| clicked on search result, you lose the context about the
| remaining results
|
| - you can login with Github (so no need to register for many
| people, at least for programming-related projects)
| smallerfish wrote:
| Zulip is great in concept, but the execution lets it down a
| little. "stream events" for example sounds awfully techie. The
| UI is not very pretty, fonts are small, etc. It's not clear
| where to start a chat in a brand new (or empty channel). If
| they focused on UI for a few months they'd have an easy winner,
| but in its current state I've had two separate non-techie teams
| look at it and recoil, and go back to Slack.
|
| (Also, Zulip should try to compete against NextDoor - but to do
| so they'd need more control around content expiry once the
| storage limit was hit. No neighborhood is going to pay $7 per
| user, so the free offering needs to be compelling.)
| aasasd wrote:
| I just recently got into a few old games with mods and stuff, and
| am having my share of sites gone up Lethe, search engines being
| clueless lately, file sharing sites poofed into the wind or
| serving a 404, and things just not behaving in my environment.
| Now that I'm also presented with the thought of all info being
| clumped into endless inaccessible chat logs, I'm already mourning
| for when I try to fiddle with current-ish games in ten years from
| now and fail miserably. Plus, If Discord itself disappears,
| that'll be a massive brain fart for gaming as a whole.
|
| Individual pages for each discussion are awesome, how are people
| not seeing that? There are of course two sides: that keeping
| Discord channels is easy (I guess) and brain-dumping into the
| chats is effortless, for better or worse; and that searching for
| past info is impossible--but who thinks of that now. Good luck to
| me in ten years, with reading through ten years worth of chats.
|
| (Gamers are already pretty bad at having their mod files
| preserved and served securely, what with shady file sharing sites
| that keep dying, and no checksums anywhere. And with complete
| absence of open-source culture--just download this binary linked
| in a forum comment, from a shady site, and run it with admin
| privileges, what could go wrong!)
| unpopularopp wrote:
| Discord "won me" over the voice chat. It's just so easy to use
| and setup for people. I know it's a hard pill to swallow on HN
| but NOT everyone wants and/or can run their own
| TS/Mumble/Ventrilo server. That's the number 1 reason Discord
| became popular in gaming groups. Want voice chat for your WoW
| raid? 2 clicks. Going to play CSOG with your friends? Here is the
| voice chat channel.
|
| Discord is not perfect for sure (the search function is atrocious
| for example) but more intuitive and easier to use than the other
| options. And you can also stream, share screen, rich embed things
| etc.
| kristjank wrote:
| You can get just as good voice chat on Signal, and it is miles
| easier to use than Discord, especially for people familiar with
| WhatsApp, Viber and other privacy invaders.
|
| And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets
| glorified over work just as well over [matrix]
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Does Signal even have some sort of channels? From their
| website it looks like it's just chats like iMessage/WhatsApp
| etc? It might be great at what it does but no Discord I'm in
| would work without channels.
| gobip wrote:
| It is exactly like WhatsApp. In fact, nowadays, WhatsApp is
| Signal (as in, they use the same protocol), but it's the
| same hierarchy: contacts + groups of contacts, and nothing
| else.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Signal is a pile of crap. Seriously I am in a small chat with
| four other people and sometimes it just doesn't sync messages
| and when it does my phone turns into a vibrating sex toy for
| 20 minutes.
| 3OCSzk wrote:
| It might be easier but I'm not leaking my phone number just
| to have voice chat with internet friends
| tasha0663 wrote:
| Giving out a phone number to make a phone call. The horror
| :)
| xigoi wrote:
| So it's better to leak over other personal information? Use
| Jitsi or something.
| remram wrote:
| What personal information? All you need is a screen name.
| I don't think Discord even requires an email to join a
| server (if guests are enabled).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You do require email and mobile authentication text
| message on sign up.
| remram wrote:
| But you don't have to sign up to chat, you can open
| Discord in your browser and join a server as guest.
| Granted, the server might limit what guests can do.
|
| I just went through the sign-up process and no phone
| number was required though, only email.
| xigoi wrote:
| It's nonfree software, so you can only assume that it's
| spying on you.
| iqanq wrote:
| I don't care if Discord sees my ip/email, but I really,
| really don't want other users to see them.
| xigoi wrote:
| Oh. I thought you were complaining about giving your
| phone number to Signal.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| I feel like Discord is very different than Signal or WhatsApp
| and target very different use cases.
|
| Signal and WhatsApp are basically replacements for phone,
| SMS, and MMS while Discord is meant to be more of a community
| with many people on many topics in many channels.
|
| They are all quite good at what they do, but they do
| different things.
|
| A more direct alternative to Discord is Matrix.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >and it is miles easier to use than Discord
|
| No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and
| have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an
| app, not do they need to make an account.
| maven29 wrote:
| Navigation is horribly broken if you don't login. You're
| just stuck in a loop typing in usernames.
|
| Several OSS projects that I've seen even have sophisticated
| bot protection and code of conduct agreement schemes that
| will hide the useful channels until you apply reactions on
| verification messages.
|
| IRC channels used to keep public logs. Can we at least have
| parity with that?
| donkarma wrote:
| you need to use app to voice chat on discord, and need an
| account to use anything on discord
| yoavm wrote:
| Unless this is a new thing, I used to do video and audio
| calls on Discord on Firefox on Linux without issues. No
| app.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Agreed. They also do some black magic where even with my mic
| wide open it won't pick up things I don't want it to. I could
| eat potato chips right into the mic and it won't turn the mic
| on, but as soon as I speak it does. The vox in discord always
| amazes me. It seems to always know what I want to transmit and
| what I don't.
| donkarma wrote:
| yeah how long until they run out of VC funding? no chance this
| is profitable. i know many people who use discord as their
| personal cloud storage
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Anecdotally, yes, but I doubt most users deliberately make
| themselves unprofitable. There're millions of kids who just
| want to use voice chat and share meme gifs. Plus Discord has
| been gating a lot of features behind Nitro in recent years,
| and they make a lot of money from Nitro/Boost purchases (it's
| hard to tell since they're privately owned but they might
| make close to 200 million this year). I suspect they can stay
| afloat without VC funding (though they keep getting it
| anyway). And their valuation is really high.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| mmm I don't know, I've found myself needing to reload Discord
| multiple times. For voice chat with my friends I use Jitsi, it
| works way better.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling
| logs.
|
| There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord,
| nor to log to an external text file.
|
| That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed
| at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy
| search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through
| text to try to find what I'm interested in.
|
| Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.
|
| By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use
| powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools
| to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super
| fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.
|
| I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any
| server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done
| completely offline.
|
| If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're
| interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're
| completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're
| interested in out of it.
|
| The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is
| inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can
| sometimes be useful) and voice chat.
|
| Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for
| me than IRC.
| iceflinger wrote:
| I remember their official twitter responding to someone that
| exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for
| whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly
| https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump
|
| But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a
| built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I don't know a way to export logs, but I am in some Discord
| channels which have a bot joined to connect them to an IRC
| channel in a 2-way echo. The IRC side of that could be logging
| everything from that channel with standard IRC logs.
|
| > _" The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over
| IRC is inline images and voice chat._"
|
| Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python
| markdown syntax; replying to a message brings a clickable line
| of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous
| line in the chat.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| I hate the discordification of communities. A lot of them did not
| survive the modern era and moved en masse there, but the
| experience is miserable, and they're usually moderated in a
| manner that doesn't spur discussion ("move to this section for X
| topic", et cetera, that's just one I see often). Finding content?
| You have to use some weird bot or the awful search function
| worthy of a high school assignment website project. Besides, it's
| also difficult to access it from my recent experience. You can
| provide a valid email and phone number, validate, and it may
| still suspend you for "violating ToS" (?) immediately after
| signing up. I don't think it's suited for a lot of things that
| end up on there, that shouldn't really be in IM-form, but maybe
| it's just old-me.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That's actually my number one issue with Discord: the
| stratification of discussion. With IRC, your "community" is a
| singular channel where everyone congregates and talks. It can
| be chaotic, and maybe you only check in and catch up so often,
| but it's all in one place.
|
| Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super
| specific topics. So you're not only spreading discussion over
| tons of channels where things will be evenly quiet and
| unnoticed, but you now have to go and laboriously check each of
| them to find new stuff. Or mute half of them you don't care
| about so you're not constantly being spammed with unread
| indicators. This also creates the "internet cop" problem, where
| whoever created the community (or someone they added as a
| moderator) feels the need to constantly yell at people for
| having organic discussions instead of searching for the
| specific channel approved for topic #365.
|
| Basically, the whole thing seems to discourage discussion more
| than foster it, because people simply don't work that way. That
| sort of structure works for forums, but not for something
| happening in real time.
| agumonkey wrote:
| The "human" aspect of discord annoyed me too much, there's
| indeed a lot of seriousness brought by the "possibilities" of
| the app and the spirit of today where everything has to be
| classified. People are becoming very tense about information,
| it's like music shows with smartphone filming except with
| admins in a chan.
| niblettc wrote:
| There's a huge opening in the market between slack and discord
| for community conversation and organization. My startup is
| working on this right now with a web3 implementation.
| searchableguy wrote:
| I would love to connect and learn more. Email is in my profile.
| minerva23 wrote:
| Discord has (very fast) search and I've had a ton of success
| searching for a problem and finding answers. YMMV I guess.
| Coding_Cat wrote:
| As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to
| the defense of Discord here.
|
| First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had.
| Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by
| search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree
| that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical
| project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though
| you can always write a bot for that).
|
| However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit
| like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for
| what are really demographic changes.
|
| Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a
| few people agreeing with it, it says
|
| > And without going all good-old days Internet you damn
| whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style
| dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized
| content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I
| have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after
| posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social
| interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight
| and permanence that they used to.
|
| which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also
| goes on to say
|
| > I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike:
| Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone
| on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences,
| and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with
| public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.
|
| Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly
| called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because
| having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking
| Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet.
| Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my
| social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones.
| Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.
|
| And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord
| for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing
| and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the
| modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+
| spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.
|
| But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already
| skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid
| spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't
| really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But
| for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord
| is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games
| and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social
| media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream
| for a while.
|
| That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the
| quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of
| demographics and aging.
|
| But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the
| shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.
| mabbo wrote:
| Discord is a wonderful program for real-time communication and
| asynchronous conversations. But are either of those use-cases how
| you want to provide a help system?
|
| Imagine if Stack Overflow was ephemeral. If once you asked a
| question, the question and answer slowly faded into nothingness
| for everyone who wasn't actively on the system when it was asked?
| And anyone who wanted help had to ask _again_ , while the experts
| rolled their eyes going "Ugh, we answered that like a dozen times
| already!".
|
| It's a different use-case. It requires a different tool.
| pictur wrote:
| I think this is a serious problem for the companies you
| mentioned. Some questions are asked maybe dozens of times and
| there is no written answer anywhere. or this is the correct one
| i don't know but it's a weird problem.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Strange criticism. Feels more like the person is unhappy with
| community managers / admins who don't know better and shoehorn
| Discord into everything community-related, especially where a
| more async easier to catch-up with media like forum would work
| better.
|
| Fast-moving chat channels and forums both have their very valid
| uses.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I would argue that all timeline-based communication tools are
| black holes for information.
|
| How much knowledge has been lost to IRC channels, chat
| conversations, forum threads, and so-on?
|
| Yes, many of us have gotten good (or even excellent) at parsing
| through threads to find the nuggets of information that lead us
| to the understanding we seek, but it's clearly not the
| environment that information wants in order to thrive.
| VectorLock wrote:
| >for whatever reason server admins just love to split the
| community across what feels like hundreds of unnecessary channels
| no one will ever use or look at
|
| I see this one a lot. Server Admins love to customize their
| servers and the primary way they do it is by adding a thousand
| channels with emoji names that make them difficult to link to,
| and dozens of bots that have marginal utility at best and are
| absolute noise factories at worst.
| pingsl wrote:
| What he described is not only a Discord "issue", it applied to
| other modern communication tools as well. I feel Discord is
| better than Slack because there is no 10K searchable message
| limit for free accounts and ridiculous pricing model.
| arkitaip wrote:
| At least discord doesn't just paywall content you created
| yourself like Slack does. I have seen dozens of slack servers
| where entire channels are scrubbed of information because they
| are on the free plan and hit the 10k messages limit.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yes, but why it it's Slack's job to pay for these archives? I'm
| sure they are not that expensive, at least individually, but I
| more blame the people who are encouraging these valuable
| discussions to be posted there.
| jbirer wrote:
| It's not Discord's fault as much as it is the fault of lazy
| owners who don't know how to set up a Gitter or IRC or a
| stackexchange clone.
| udbhavs wrote:
| Gitter is much better in this regard since messages can be
| indexed by search engines and show up in searches.
| pharke wrote:
| Couldn't this be solved with a service that automatically
| archives Discord chat in a forum format and hosts it online?
| xigoi wrote:
| At that point, why not just use something else?
| everyone wrote:
| I really like Discord, but maybe its cus I grew up without
| internet. If you joined some club (like geology club or
| something) back in the day, you would show up and ask questions
| and whoever was there would answer your questions and ye would
| chat. They wouldn't respond by simply saying "RTFM!!" or "Someone
| already asked this!"
|
| I think that attitude (like on stack overflow) That they are
| building some kind of perfect repository of knowledge for the
| ages from these various question and answers is delusional and
| has ruined that site in recent years. _Most_ stuff on the
| internet seems to be highly transitory, constantly getting taken
| down by DMCA or some other bullshit with new stuff being uploaded
| in its place. Also the questions and answers themselves quickly
| become obsolete as tech changes.
|
| Also, simply RTFM is not a good way to learn. There's plenty of
| evidence suggesting that asking questions and interactive
| learning is superior to simply learning by rote out of a book.
| When I'm learning (especially at the beginning, I really wanna
| ask loads of dumb questions and chat to someone who is already
| versed in the subject)
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| Discord being a black hole for information is a feature, not a
| bug. It's for in the moment communication with some asynchronous
| applicability. But if you use it as your primary source for
| community-created information, you're using it wrong.
| pndy wrote:
| I think that _feature_ makes quite obvious why Microsoft was
| interested in purchasing Discord - that would give Redmond an
| enormous amount of information to mine through every second,
| every day
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Again we have the two sides "everything is thrown away" vs
| "everything is kept forever".
|
| This: " _Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github,
| have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join
| the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an
| iron._" - Turd Ferguson
|
| is not the same value as a piece of documentation for how to use
| a tool might be, both needing to be kept forever and surfaced in
| all future search results. Forum content is awful in its own
| ways.
|
| Is there no system which keeps good content and poor content is
| deleted over time? For values of 'good' and 'poor' which mirror
| what people might want in search results, 'what does $error
| mean?' being good and 'I HATE THING, THING USERS ARE IDIOTS'
| being bad even if archaeologists might love it.
| wheresmycraisin wrote:
| 1) It's not worse than IRC or Slack, and in some ways superior
| since it has a lower barrier of entry (IRC is... IRC, and slack
| user management/invite system is weird) 2) When was recording of
| live, synchronous communication ever meant to be a repository of
| information? Do people complain that audio transcriptions of
| group discussions are an inadequate replacement for purposely
| written documentation? There's a reason you take notes during a
| meeting.
| monocultured wrote:
| Twenty or so years ago I was running Hotline and KDX servers, and
| loved having "my own place" where people could visit and hang
| out. Recently, I started a Discord channel to rediscover some of
| that same feeling, but it's mostly become a persistent chat for
| my friends (in lieu of Messanger, Telegram, etc). Some other
| channels I've joined are quite quirky and fun though.
|
| The main difference being that you could only be logged in at one
| server at a time - unless you had multiple client installs - and
| there's something nice about that limit; you have to choose a
| hangout and tend to engage more because of it.
|
| I agree with the OP though - I wouldn't rely on Discord as a
| knowledge repo...
| aaomidi wrote:
| People are using it as a knowledge repo and it's not indexable.
|
| Learning from past discussions is getting so much harder.
|
| Discord can and should fix this.
| madars wrote:
| The worst part about Discord is that it is against their ToS to
| use third-party clients (and there are reports of people's
| accounts being banned for them making the black hole effect
| worse). In particular, you can't have a client that has local
| chat history, local search, or just better information density on
| the screen:
|
| >All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and
| the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I
| don't recommend using them.
|
| https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| I'd argue that it's not too significant of an issue, as
| generally most clients do a good job of presenting themselves
| with completely normal behaviour to the discord api. Most
| people are banned because of API limits, such as attempting to
| spam without keeping in mind the limits, (Random delays with
| around 1 msg/s last I tried), or there's a bug in the client,
| such as ripcord once causing a login loop for me. If you keep
| it sensible, it's fine. Most people using these custom clients
| know the dangers and keep information on how to get back into
| everything, so there's not too much of a black hole effect.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I periodically see complaints like this posted here. I wonder if
| I am in an information bubble.
|
| Are HN readers, a more traditional forum, biased against non-
| traditional fora? If nothing else, it would be hard for to post a
| link on HN to Discord discussion about the advantages of Discord,
| where, presumably, such a discussion would most likely transpire.
| xigoi wrote:
| Discord is not a forum, but an instant chat app for gamers.
| Using it as a forum is the problem.
| derbOac wrote:
| I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm tired of proprietary,
| centralized communication systems. What I want is open,
| accessible, and decentralized or at least federated, or
| something that someone can start up an instance of. I don't
| care if _you_ want to start your own server, or use something
| hosted, I just want it to be the case that _someone_ can.
|
| Traditional forums aren't networked. It's not like I can mirror
| HN either. But I could go start a forum somewhere if I wanted,
| and there would be a record of posts somewhere.
|
| Discord kinda runs into two problems for me: it isn't an open
| decentralized protocol, and it seems like it's being misused or
| something? I guess if devs want to use it and welcome anyone to
| come in and see what's going on, great. But then I'd prefer
| they use something decentralized, and it still isn't a
| substitute for a forum or forum-like place.
|
| I think your question is an important one just as a sort of
| perspective check, but I can articulate pretty clearly what it
| is about use of Discord that bothers me, and can point to very
| popular systems that work much better as theoretical examples
| or templates in my mind (for example, Matrix, Reddit, or
| Twitter).
| inopinatus wrote:
| One can hardly describe Discord as non-traditional, since there
| are no new ideas on display. It's well executed for the needs
| of a particular segment, that's all.
| genewitch wrote:
| we were doing what discord did back on AOL and msmsgs.exe!
| derbOac wrote:
| In some ways in fact the problem is that Discord is too
| traditional.
| rchaud wrote:
| I agree 100% with the article. To community organizers: for the
| love of all that is holy, set up a proper message board with
| threaded discussions. Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?
|
| Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people
| in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but
| also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-
| purpose channel, conversations die off as the subject of
| discussion is constantly changing. If I wasn't online at the
| time, I can't bring up the same topic the next morning, because
| it's been discussed already.
|
| Compare this to something like the forums on rateyourmusic.com.
| There are long-standing conversations about specific topics that
| are years old. Everything is easily searchable, and can be
| refined to searching inside topics. On profile pages for artists
| and albums, you can see links to discussions related to that
| artist or album. This is elegant design that's extremely user
| friendly. The polar opposite of that is a Discord server with
| with 5-6 extremely broad channels, and a never-ended series of
| ellipses notifying you that someone is about to post another
| message that will soon be lost to the void.
| slx26 wrote:
| >> Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?
|
| It helps create a sense of community very quickly, and it helps
| keep it alive.
|
| Honestly, trying to judge Discord for its ability to structure
| information is simply missing its point. I dislike many things
| about Discord, but projecting my needs or preferences onto it
| and saying it's bad based on that alone is quite shortsighted.
| taubek wrote:
| Maybe one day Discord will have a feature to enable indexing of
| content by external services or to make it public.
| unixfg wrote:
| If it's reliably used as an opportunity to improve documentation,
| then I can see Discord having a place and forums not being
| necessary. I wouldn't expect that to happen, though; I know how I
| feel about documenting even when I'm being paid to do it.
| cybarDOTlive wrote:
| I was just interested in learning about a micro blogging project
| from Twitter and their blog is basically empty, but the discord
| has a lot of activity. It's a bit jarring to see these
| professionals interacting on a gaming platform, and adds a lot of
| friction for me personally. I'm really interested in the
| technology and updates but not enough to sift through their
| chitchatting. No offense.
|
| https://blueskyweb.org/ https://discord.gg/YmrHBhCuFa
| rchaud wrote:
| It's precisely the pointless chitchat that makes the UX of
| Discord so bad for Reddit/Stack Overflow like use cases. I'm
| not there to socialize!
| nickvec wrote:
| Never liked Discord. Always thought it was extremely confusing
| and cluttered. Information overload for sure, and very hard to
| keep track of things unless you are checking it constantly.
| throwaway3snao wrote:
| Furthermore, not only it's closed source but you are giving all
| your conversations and metadata to a private company.
|
| It is a free data host[ag]ing platform run for profit.
|
| Your data is safe and accessible as long as the economic
| incentives are aligned with that.
| 40four wrote:
| For software projects, Discord isn't my favorite either. But on
| the other hand, I have used it successfully for getting help, and
| finding previous answers to my questions. To say everything gets
| buried in the flow of chat doesn't make much sense to me. Discord
| has a rather robust search feature, and it works well. Search for
| what you need, if it was talked about before you'll find it. If
| not ask a new question.
| willjp wrote:
| I agree, but it's not discord's fault. Discord is great at what
| it does. I find the same social issues with discord, slack,
| gitter, irc, matrix.org, etc. Chat may be good for the
| questioneer, but it's bad for search/retention. I kind of miss
| the prominence of phpbb.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| Matrix chats can be indexed by google and other search engines
| if set to public.
| genewitch wrote:
| the ones on my homeserver aren't, and searching for the
| domain of the homeserver shows that users are in rooms on
| other homeservers/networks.
| willjp wrote:
| Oh I didn't realize that, thank you!
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I have never seen a matrix result show up in google though.
| 127 wrote:
| On the other hand, it's good that not everything we do and say on
| the Internet gets stored permanently in some database.
| jimmont wrote:
| Discord is like having a conversation in a loud, popular pub
| between happy hour ending and business peaks. Some people love
| it. I imagine it relates to how much hearing loss and the depth
| of interaction desired. Github's various features and
| stackexchange appear to fill the gap covering the entirety of
| happy hour.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| all they would need to do is add forum support. it's already sort
| of there with threads
| tester756 wrote:
| I disagree
|
| there are tiny details that make forums, it aint just thread
| based format
| blhack wrote:
| I experienced this when I bought a niche 3D printer (a CR30,
| which is a belt printer).
|
| The machine required a lot of finessing to get working properly,
| and almost all of the information was in discord channels.
|
| The people writing and sharing info in those channels were of
| course very gracious and helpful, but it was frustrating to try
| and search for things there instead of on a traditional forum.
| emptybottle wrote:
| Discord channel sprawl is a strange phenomenon. It happens to
| each server I've joined, just gets worse over time.
|
| I think park of the issue is that you cant /part a channel in
| discord. Every channel you have access is automatically joined,
| you can't leave and you have to adjust notifications for each to
| avoid an overwhelming number of messages.
|
| That and the communities are usually small-ish so you have the
| same people in most of the channels.
| eximius wrote:
| bigger communities work around this with roles to gate access,
| where the role is granted with bot interaction.
|
| we could argue over what the application defaults should be,
| but its not unexpected the authors and users trend toward
| engagement being the default.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Even small communities can have painfully unaware,
| "organization" obsessed OCD people in it. They are generally
| the ones that keep insisting some particular thread of
| discussion really belongs in #xyz.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| The solution I use to combat this is right click > mute server
| for every server I join, and also check the box under
| notifications > suppress @everyone and @here notifications.
| Then if I want notifications (either just the visual dot
| indicator or an actual ping for messages) I can do that on a
| per channel basis.
|
| The only notifications I get are when I'm explicitly tagged or
| if a role I've opted in to is tagged. This cleans up the
| notification spam almost entirely, I only wish there was a way
| to set that as the default for any new server I join.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Every server eventually adds channels for memes, general off-
| topic, and pets.
| iqanq wrote:
| Discord is a chat program. Chat comes and goes. The fact that
| search sucks is a feature. If you need a good search feature,
| good categorisation, etc then you need a forum or something
| similar. People use Discord because they don't want a forum, they
| want a chat.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Just don't use one of those modern forums that basically act
| like chat rooms...
|
| Chat and forums/wikis should probably be integrated in one app
| again, like the old shoutboxes on forums.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Most information, especially anything about video games, is
| tucked away in a discord nowadays. I'm in many that literally
| act as storage of information - a large number of channels that
| only the admin can post in where they post info.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the
| hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea.
|
| If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free
| crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search,
| non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible.
|
| Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same
| properties. Facebook is the same way.
|
| Anything that funnels people into multi-thousand post individual
| pages is going to lose information.
|
| Old proboards forums, github issues, and wikis don't have this
| problem. Content is in smaller blocks that can be linked to
| easily, and there is a strong culture of keeping topics focused.
| You don't have multiple unrelated conversations in one place.
|
| You can jump to the end or beginning of a thread when quickly
| skimming to see if it's relevant.
|
| And you can see all threads in a given time period pretty easily
| with pagination, when you want to understand the larger picture
| at a point and time.
|
| These are all things that are useful both for a sense of
| community and for technical work itself.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I find myself enjoying searching vintage mailing lists a lot
| more. Maybe a matter of information density (people think more
| and speak less ?)
| urthor wrote:
| > There is a strong culture of keeping topics focused
|
| I think you're mistaking the type of content on
| Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their
| platforms.
|
| Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of
| academic citations.
|
| GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers
| preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe.
|
| They both have the same property: end users displaying
| individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments.
|
| People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty
| topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are
| there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work.
|
| And that's okay, we all do.
|
| Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use.
| It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to
| wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search,
| grep, or any other search bar I've encountered.
|
| Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn
| the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord
| than picking up regex and grep ever was.
| guywhocodes wrote:
| I've been working with this idea for a while, that it's
| immutable pagination that makes any written work worthwhile.
| With it we can spatially reason about it and we commit its
| location to memory. You can never do that with an infinite
| scroll.
|
| Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use
| slack for example.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Timestamp instead of page number?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| you can search everything in discourse and categorize it, it
| has all the same features you mentioned about github
|
| I never lose info like I do in discord
| jsemrau wrote:
| The UI should differentiate between comment and relevant
| contextual replies. None of the existing social networks manage
| that properly.
| CyberShadow wrote:
| Discourse isn't all that bad with JavaScript disabled.
| [deleted]
| opdahl wrote:
| What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between
| the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to
| guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord
| is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it,
| and don't really miss any communication going in. These people
| have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the
| problem of not knowing where the past information is, because
| they were there when that information was communicated and
| therefore never need to look back at it. These people will
| (obviously) recommend using Discord, since it works so well for
| them!
|
| The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then
| hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so
| they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the
| channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any
| of the lost information these super users don't even think about.
| This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice,
| since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless
| chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit
| friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
|
| Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it
| so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the
| information organized for people that aren't hard core community
| members.
|
| Edit: Wrote "clique" wrong
| neutronicus wrote:
| I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are
| nice on Discord.
|
| Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent
| record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to
| drive people off the deep end.
| adam12 wrote:
| My experience is exactly opposite. People seem to go to war
| when they know that the conversation will just be lost over
| time.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless
| there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7.
|
| On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can
| fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come
| back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes
| forever.
| tester756 wrote:
| weird
|
| if anybody wants, then he can save it easily
|
| also forums tend to be as anonymous as discord, so idk.
| JonathanMerklin wrote:
| I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if
| it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.
|
| I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business
| functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat
| application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that
| I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think
| s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as
| "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed"
| (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've
| seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups
| communicating through Discord).
|
| That said, the number of teams and departments I have either
| encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere
| whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment
| interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb
| one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my
| life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor
| lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just
| try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure
| or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs"
| ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the
| knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like
| teardrops against the ocean sometimes.
| Coding_Cat wrote:
| I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for
| anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though
| people still use Google and Paypal too).
|
| I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving
| (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an
| email or knocking on someones door for a chat.
|
| And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin
| wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most
| reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not
| much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever
| something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a
| Discord bot for that.
|
| However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of
| self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this
| pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous
| issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
| woko wrote:
| This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search
| box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so
| I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time
| I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine
| make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the
| pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.
| friedturkey wrote:
| I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3
| weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so
| common.
|
| The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one
| advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't
| (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private
| communities might keep that from happening... unless they get
| bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"
| zhte415 wrote:
| USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for
| wan of a better one.
|
| Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a
| network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle
| Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being
| indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of
| Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter
| being bullied into change from their earlier premise to
| serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the
| reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord
| would die without the _waste time through repetition_ that
| holds membership (for now).
| arriu wrote:
| It seems like AI could be setup to address this. I would think
| it would be insanely useful.
|
| Personally, I'd rather look at an enriched summary than the
| original chat log in most cases. Can somebody get on this
| please :)
| zerber wrote:
| andrecarini wrote:
| A couple of things I personally find disappointing in Discord:
|
| 1) No concept of isolated identities for each server (or group
| of servers).
|
| 2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I
| have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a
| week or so.
|
| 3) Hard to find messages I have been mentioned in. I think
| there's an "inbox" that clears itself out after X days.
|
| 4) Pollution, mostly visually (can't collapse certain
| elements).
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do,
| I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects
| after a week or so.
|
| Do you perhaps have multiple sessions of discord open at the
| same time? I only get the login when I accidentally open
| discord multiple times, otherwise I never really get asked
| for a login.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| if you pay for nitro you can change your identity per server
| charcircuit wrote:
| Without nitro you can still nickname yourself.
| remram wrote:
| People will still see the "server you're both in" and the
| game your currently playing, etc. Not good for work
| servers.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Use web only discord and aggressively disable
| permissions. This results in less tracking and spying on
| you
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Wait. "Work servers"?
|
| People use Discord for work chat?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Yes, most of my work conversations happen on discord
| servers. Discord provides a better chat service than
| slack, so I don't see how it would be unusual for people
| to use Discord over slack.
| spockz wrote:
| Although you can disable automatically setting your
| status to whichever game you are playing though.
| remram wrote:
| You can disable it _globally, for all servers_ , yes
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a
| replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for
| discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum
| app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords
| you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the
| same stuff asked every single day.
|
| If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a
| forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to
| see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum.
| If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.
|
| I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a
| real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.
| zppln wrote:
| A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| hacker news is also a horrible place because after a few
| days it locks you out from answering to responses
| voussoir wrote:
| After years and years of making bad changes to the site,
| they recently did one thing right: they removed or greatly
| extended the period that you can reply to and upvote posts.
| It used to be that after 6 months everything was
| "archived", but now I see an open comment field on posts
| that are ten years old.
|
| I've already gotten one or two comment replies to some
| years-old comments of mine, and I was able to help answer
| their questions.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Still far better than discord or twitter, at least for
| text/pictures. Audio/Video-channels on discord can be nice,
| though.
| etripe wrote:
| Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit
| culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation
| seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid
| volunteers.
| zer0-c00l wrote:
| Moderation being left to unpaid community members is a
| sign that Reddit DOES take moderation seriously
| yucky wrote:
| Not when you consider the type of people that unpaid
| moderation attracts. Reddit is broken.
| guilherme-puida wrote:
| Trying to find a specific post on a subreddit is a
| nightmare. The built in search functionality is horrible.
| evilduck wrote:
| I would disagree, searching for a topic or question on
| any search engine and appending 'reddit' gets me reddit
| discussions that are frequently relevant to my question
| (game tips, bugs encountered in some software, often real
| user reviews for products, etc).
|
| Reddit's redesign is annoying and their own search isn't
| great but the alternative sources for a lot of communal
| information is completely inaccessible. I cannot search
| Google for Discord conversations and get information
| about my Lenovo laptop's rear thunderbolt port
| misbehaving, even though I witnessed that conversation
| take place multiple times on the unofficial Legion
| Discord community. If you're not on Discord and sort of
| active in a community it might as well not exist.
| remram wrote:
| At least it is indexed in Google. Not an excuse for
| Reddit's horrible search, I know, but IM doesn't even
| have that option.
| rchaud wrote:
| Just use Google. Reddit's built in search is useless in
| comparison. Yesterday I found a great thread about suit
| tailors in my city. The posts were all 3 years old but
| fortunately the tailor was still active. Digging up this
| info would be impossible on Discord, because at best I'd
| be locating individual comments asking about the topic,
| then scroll down to see if anybody bothered to post a
| response instead of changing the topic to something else.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| You have to use google "site:" to have any chance at all.
| i don't know why reddit's search is so awful
| Smithalicious wrote:
| In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about
| 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model
| discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long
| tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20
| people.
|
| Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else
| has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most
| of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think
| there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment.
|
| Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't
| understand how people put up with that.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| That's basically how I use. Just as a replacement for
| Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games.
| It's rather good for this use case. I think there's maybe 10
| people on our server, and I'm pretty happy with the UX.
| wyclif wrote:
| About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely
| stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them.
| The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users
| but are terrible for finding information that the org they
| represent needs to retain.
| urthor wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why?
|
| Seems fairly simple to perform simple keyword searching,
| just like Slack.
| wyclif wrote:
| Sure, you can keyword search easily enough, but the
| information you might be looking for is sometimes
| scattered over dozens of channels.
| zerber wrote:
| Accacin wrote:
| To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for
| gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for
| multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc.
|
| I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise
| and too many annoucements.
| pndy wrote:
| In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying
| to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in
| same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can
| clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet
| fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a
| chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who
| clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place,
| will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like
| you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become _the
| manager_ /s.
| remram wrote:
| I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work,
| instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing
| (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search
| limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There
| is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can
| be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones,
| but people can still track you across (for example with the
| "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your
| avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature.
|
| I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a
| ban-able offence.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| maybe some input, i'm young (technically a zoomer), but i'd
| older (in terms of what interests me).
|
| many of my friends all use discord. a lot of online communities
| use it (popular subreddits, prog langs i use, even some github
| repo's have them). so why not use it? nobody in these groups
| really uses irc (except some prog langs). do i just ignore
| them? that'd be no fun. i want in on the fun. i'm not gonna be
| a hermit in a hut. so i use discord. the "fun" out weighs the
| anti-privacy of discord - and i don't share much personal on
| there anyways.
| n3dm wrote:
| Not really, people despise it for other reasons. I.e. how
| bloated and sketchy their privacy practices are and just how
| invasive it is.
| zerber wrote:
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Aerroon wrote:
| But do you _need_ to know the past discussions? I don 't really
| see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more
| than usual.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| If you go to technical discords you'll find that there's
| someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions
| that was aksed the day before.
|
| These people annoy existing servers members and get angry
| replies because people are so tired of answering the same
| basic question multiple times a day.
|
| Some servers have created processes where you can only access
| the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then
| you can enter 'general'. That clearly shows that something is
| wrong with content discovery on Discord.
| megapolitics wrote:
| That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits,
| which are usually touted as superior alternatives to
| Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look
| preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found
| a solution to a problem predating Discord.
| netr0ute wrote:
| > These people annoy existing servers members and get angry
| replies because people are so tired of answering the same
| basic question multiple times a day.
|
| From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either
| fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to
| always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
| cinntaile wrote:
| This always happens, people don't bother reading old info.
| Discord simply lowers the barrier to ask questions. It's
| probably a net positive overall.
| johnny22 wrote:
| i wish i could enable that for IRC reasonably without
| running my own bots and such.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > If you go to technical discords you'll find that there's
| someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions
| that was aksed the day before.
|
| I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s.
| People asking the same questions as someone else asked the
| day before was the norm back then too.
|
| In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because
| it has history in the client. You can easily search what's
| been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many
| times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant
| server and similar.
|
| You also get the history when you join, so you immediately
| get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very
| active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
|
| IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded
| the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the
| logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did
| this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and
| hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours
| to realize this was a dead place.
|
| That being said, I do think open source projects should
| consider alternatives like Gitter.
| remram wrote:
| You mean: is has history on the _server_?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Discord has history on the server, unlike IRC. This makes
| a huge difference when joining a new channel.
| scambier wrote:
| > I've been in programming IRC channels since the late
| 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else
| asked the day before was the norm back then too.
|
| With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat
| history, unless you used a bouncer
| beebeepka wrote:
| Nothing stopping any client from having logs. mirc and
| xchat have had them for decades. Yes, they are local but
| do exist and serve their purpose
| timmattison wrote:
| Sure. But when you first join there is no history which
| means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same
| questions because there was nothing they could search.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Exactly, and it won't search for stuff that was written
| when your client, or the bot, wasn't running.
|
| Sure, you could set up bouncers and whatnot. But it's a
| barrier that Discord doesn't have.
| eadler wrote:
| didn't unrealircd do something similar 10+ years ago?
| qayxc wrote:
| Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues.
|
| Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The
| worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is
| new people repeating points that have been resolved already
| while the discussion has since moved on.
|
| Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space
| repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search
| avoids.
| simias wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have
| a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and
| newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would
| trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info
| is... optimistic.
|
| Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource
| that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to
| easily reference it from the chat.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| I think people will generally read the log up to one day
| in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of
| applications can be thousands of messages in a big group.
| Require everyone to read every message before sending a
| message is just unrealistic.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Discord also has a search feature, and it works across
| channels.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| That actually done quite well compares to other message
| apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content,
| author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date,
| after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If
| you know what did you want to search, you can probably
| find it quickly.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You are missing the meta of informational channels which are
| read only channels which come with information for people to
| reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.
| pmontra wrote:
| > and therefore never need to look back at it
|
| Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to
| find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere
| in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active
| in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable
| or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard
| side of the searchability spectrum.
| Zababa wrote:
| Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just
| one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for
| multi account, so your account for talking with your friends,
| taking classes and finding information on that video game is
| the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've
| always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect
| your identity online.
| simias wrote:
| I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is,
| seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed
| I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate
| on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather
| unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it.
|
| I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be
| invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to
| other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has
| too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find
| like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more
| manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they
| abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens
| of groups with various purposes and features and you're
| bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.
|
| I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was
| willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this...
| stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming
| and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
| nootropicat wrote:
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Very insulting response. Notification fatigue is real, and
| it's heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age.
| gjvc wrote:
| _Notification fatigue is real, and it's heavily abused by
| all apps. Regardless of your age._
|
| Amen. It seems "user-centred" design is a long-forgotten
| philosophy, having been steamrollered by "attention
| engineering".
| ailef wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm even younger but completely agree
| with GP.
|
| I now only use Discord for voice with two or three friends
| in a specific "channel" (or is it room?) but even then I
| would gladly use Teamspeak instead if possible.
| gjvc wrote:
| Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes
| to zero.
|
| Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great
| service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF
| BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the
| same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to
| break your concentration / get your attention, but they
| have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of
| other people physically around the user, by breaking their
| concentration / getting their attention.
|
| Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack
| means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be
| using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and
| having to be that guy who goes around asking people to
| silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't
| tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either
| they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they
| didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user.
|
| Another point for working from home is that one cannot
| easily distract others.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I am also old but unable to relate at all because I don't
| think I've ever worked without headphones. Home or at the
| office.
| [deleted]
| wtetzner wrote:
| The first thing I tend to do when I join a new Discord
| server is mute it.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I'm old too and use slack without any notifications or
| sound. I just am in a habit of checking it frequently
| during the day.
|
| I too have never been able to get into Discord, nor ever
| been able to participate in multiple slack organizations
| effectively.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Amen. I have all sounds and notifications disabled on all
| devices.
|
| I own the device. The device doesn't own me.
|
| What pisses me off about slack is it's actively user
| hostile. With notifications off it won't let me mute
| channels.
|
| I'd like to meet the asshole from their product team who
| designed that.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Try long tapping on a channel name in iOS and you'll get
| a mute option.
| behringer wrote:
| Maybe you're not using it right (tm)
|
| With discord, you search for a server that interest you, for
| example "city xyz gamers" and then you disable all
| notifications unless they mention you.
|
| Then you browse to your hearts content and turn on mass
| notifications for the rooms you do like to see.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but
| it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC
| (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think Matrix's biggest issue at this point is lack of
| polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as
| smooth as Telegram or Discord is it'd probably take off.
| night862 wrote:
| I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes
| it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.
|
| They're riding on the network effect that they won with
| zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client
| that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty
| darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now,
| except people actually want to pay.
|
| As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal,
| they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely
| distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of
| their service.
|
| Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client
| polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to
| say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around
| one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as
| opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit
| dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why
| would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no
| money at all?
|
| Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow
| wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to
| business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual
| users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers
| are already there.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| In my experience Slack just doesn't work as well as
| Discord does, generally speaking. It's good enough to put
| up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public
| is higher.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a
| "server" ...
|
| I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally
| called guilds.
| albio wrote:
| Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds"
| felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how
| popular their service was becoming.
| rK5Q58 wrote:
| I've been working on a simple bot for one of the
| servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as
| documentation still heavily uses the term guild.
| bozhark wrote:
| Guilded is a new discord clone.
|
| They separated those terms a long time ago, even before the
| second-hand app
| mr_beans wrote:
| 100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I
| work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate
| with the public. Abysmal!
| holler wrote:
| I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that
| has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o
| being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and
| planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the
| "server" within some folder but your presence is still
| online.
|
| If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and
| to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to
| the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of
| caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for
| good.
|
| Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close
| the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still
| continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you
| end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of
| IRC is that it's plagued with idling.
|
| And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a
| funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-
| conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream
| sources. How did we end this way?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you
| need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it?
| You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn
| things off.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but,
| now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if
| it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no
| messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow.
|
| I'm not getting any messages, but I _could_ get some at
| any moment. And then I 'd have to choose whether to
| respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not
| responding, some part of me is wondering what the
| message's level of urgency is.
|
| It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of
| the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally
| feels like going on vacation without your phone or
| something. My brain can finally relax.
| https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
| zer0-c00l wrote:
| you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this
| judiciously
| night862 wrote:
| Consider the recent studies that show that people's
| attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under
| their bed, even if its turned off.
|
| Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next
| time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel
| anything weird.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| This is like idling on IRC.
| bozhark wrote:
| You can set your online status to invisible and it never
| shows your icon while online
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle
| in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and
| skipping down to the bottom? It's not uncommon for people
| to skip in and say "morning all" in discords I'm in, even
| though there's other active conversation going. The
| backscroll then is just used for context before you go
| "alright back to work for me" and then you just stop
| responding. There's no longer an explicit join/quit
| process, but that doesn't mean there isn't one anyways just
| by nature of humanity.
| bozhark wrote:
| LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It's really
| whatever you make it.
|
| We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a
| lot of people's style.
| night862 wrote:
| This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press
| button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard,
| their limbic systems will direct them right back where
| their freidns are.
|
| "Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party
| right now."
| burnished wrote:
| That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that
| it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde
| Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use
| it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC
| needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to
| care about it in order to use it. It works even if you
| actively despise it.
| night862 wrote:
| Yes, you are very correct.
|
| Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure
| thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in
| game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their
| platform because this one.
|
| The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna
| feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game
| group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when
| everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its
| extremely fast and works in a browser.
|
| If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better
| and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this
| exact experience, what would have been egotistical would
| be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the
| thing that already works for everyone.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >what they abusively call a "server"
|
| It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A
| server is home to many channels which one can join.
| saurik wrote:
| In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server";
| multiple servers worked together as part of a network
| (which might have only had a single server in the
| degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and
| it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know
| that at some point server-local channels were added as a
| thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a
| century I never once saw anyone use them except to be
| weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided
| to use it is awkward and even off-putting.
| thfuran wrote:
| >The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use
| it is awkward and even off-putting.
|
| That seems more than a bit ridiculous.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that
| isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is
| because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because
| I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used
| TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is
| because I actually run servers for things (including
| IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very
| large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which
| is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a
| literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what
| is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and
| then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server"
| means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that
| isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| In TS/Mumble/Vent terminology, there was no federation
| (unlike IRC), so a server was generally literally a
| single server hosted somewhere. All the channels, all the
| users, etc, went to a single machine.
|
| Discord's selling point isn't really being a "better
| IRC", it's the voice chat. It's a better
| TS/Mumble/Ventrillo. Low-latency, decent audio quality,
| push-to-talk or an actually functioning level detection,
| with an easy to use interface. It's "Chat for Gamers" for
| a reason, not "IRC with history".
| alexb_ wrote:
| https://theoptionselect.com/2020/02/12/tutorial-just-check-t...
|
| "With the release of Granblue Fantasy Versus, many players are
| getting into fighting games for the first time ever. But often
| for new players, the genre can seem to be daunting or
| overwhelming. But luckily it's easier than ever to learn how to
| play. All you need to get started is to just join the Discord.
| No, not that Discord, the other one."
| poindi1 wrote:
| Discord apparently experimenting with forum features
|
| https://discord.com/blog/a-note-on-upcoming-community-experi...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/04/discord-forums-mod-tools-h...
| searchableguy wrote:
| That's looking like spectrum.chat
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| FWIW I'd take quick answer on slack anytime over bunch of
| outdated ad nauseum documentation in the maze of Confluence
|
| Slack ephemeral nature is a feature, not a bug. Same reason
| Instagram stories or Snapchat exists.
| conradludgate wrote:
| I'm a regular user of Discord, but only for Rust. Rust already
| has lots of other archival sources, so the discord is not
| replacing them.
|
| It's good for playing with a new idea, or helping a beginner get
| their code compiling. Often we link to blog posts/stack
| overflow/github for further reading.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Not having to take care of your own infrastructure is pretty nice
| though. This is just like companies that only have a Facebook
| page and no own website.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I am constantly infuriated by companies who sell actual products
| but leave user support up to some crowdsourced endless scrolling
| nightmare. Even if they do have a forum the topics (if they
| exist) will be so broad that everything gets jumbled in together.
| The search function is often sub par and kind of useless for new
| users who may not know the exact keywords they are looking for
| and apart from a little gamification (points or titles) you have
| no idea which is an authoritative answer or who actually knows
| what they're talking about. Ask any technical question anywhere
| on one of these and you're bound to get someone telling you to
| reinstall your operating system/reset your device to factory
| settings no matter how minor the actual fix is.
|
| Give me a well-maintained wiki any day.
| dvnguyen wrote:
| Shameless plug: I'm building a QA web app where you can easily
| create a QA server for your projects, and users can join your
| server with a click. Basically a stackexchange with Discord
| onboarding UX. Shoot me an email if you're interested. My email
| is on my profile.
| password4321 wrote:
| I use Discord in the browser. There is no way I'm aware of to
| tell which 'server' the notification sound came from, making the
| sound a completely useless annoyance.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to
| disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a
| question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and
| posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my
| stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are
| actually using it.
|
| I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that
| are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others.
| I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've
| also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing
| that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that
| that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything
| you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are
| more afraid to ask stupid questions.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way
| better experience.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who
| joins needs to create new account per instance
| hedgewitch wrote:
| You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still
| requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are
| going to want to pay to host a forum.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You
| can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already
| familiar with setting up servers, handling access,
| setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you
| evening or two just to get going and after that it
| requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these
| custom forums actually have backups in case something
| goes wrong?
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| You can host it for free if you set it up yourself, on your
| own server.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Please read the other comment threads that discuss this
| very thing
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| discourse is open source, you can put it on a raspberry pi
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is
| cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes,
| install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't
| any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a
| foothold in your home network, which means segragating it
| behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't
| support so you need to buy a router then of course you
| need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply
| since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice,
| but then again you didn't know that when you started.
| Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't
| just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course
| you need to setup the software and learn how it works and
| keep it up to day forever.
|
| Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you
| already know how to do and not have to worry about
| hosting anything.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or
| do anything with the data.
|
| TBH it's kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a
| raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for
| $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse
| install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I know how to run pi, but that doesn't mean it makes
| sense for everyone else or even most of the people. Say
| you have some open source project and there is a need to
| have some form of communication. You can either jump
| through the hoops to host your own forum that you need to
| host and monitor. Now you are spending time you could be
| using to work on your project on sysadmin stuff. So
| either you pay for it, which feels bad when there is free
| alternatives available which will do the job just as well
| with only lacking some discoverability in form of text
| search, but you can redemy that by making a sticky
| comment where you have FAQ or whatever you need.
|
| Evne with digital ocean you still need to worry your
| server and keep it up to date which again takes time out
| of your actual project.
|
| I don't see what problems you people see with Discord.
| Yeah you can't take all of the conversation data with
| you, but is that really what you would even want? I don't
| know what kind of projects you are running where forum is
| so much superior to discord.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| a project other people use? they can google answers or
| use forum search... I'm not at their beck and call to
| answer questions in chat
|
| different people will like different things, but chat is
| transient
|
| an hour a month on server maintenance isn't going to make
| or break anyone's project, but if you don't like
| tinkering with things there's nothing wrong with that
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >a project other people use? they can google answers or
| use forum search
|
| can you give example?
| redwall_hp wrote:
| This is the incessant cycle I've been seeing a lot of for
| the past ten years:
|
| 1. Depend on proprietary service that silos data
|
| 2. Service changes price or shuts down or does something
| unpopular
|
| 3. People migrate to a new product baiting people with a
| free offering
|
| 4. Go to 1
|
| We never should have left self-hosted bulletin boards and
| IRC. Hosting is cheaper and better than ever.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| and bulleting boards get corked on weekly basis.
|
| why is a forum so much better than a chat and FAQ? I
| really can't see the problem you guys are trying to fix
| here.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| the free cycle is the worst, vc money screws over a lot
| of people that could just be running traditional
| businesses - there are good institutional shake ups as a
| result sometimes, but then the new players ultimately
| become what they sought to disrupt
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a
| sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO,
| https://flarum.org/
|
| It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in
| shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Is composer a problem for shared hosts?
|
| Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared
| hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on
| your local machine to install the dependencies and then
| copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to
| what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared
| host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
| Prestoon wrote:
| One of my biggest issues is that the principles and ideas that
| come with the open source community are practically shutout by
| the use of discord. Information does not flow freely, it's
| locked in a server and it's not easily accessible by other
| people. It's not indexed by search engines. It might as well be
| missing completely. Half the time I plan to learn an open
| source project and learn that the majority of the discussion
| goes on in Discord, I already know that I'm going to have a
| horrible time finding answers when I need them so I just search
| for alternatives.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| Isn't it an illusion though that GitHub is more accessible
| than discord? Yes, it's indexed by Google, buy these days
| it'll disappear quickly if it is deleted. I don't even know
| if all of GitHub and its issues are even indexed to be
| honest.
|
| You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read
| only without an account.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| This is the argument that most of these comments are making.
| But Discord isn't supposed to replace a bug tracker or
| documentation. It's supposed to replace IRC or a mailing
| list.
|
| The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be
| accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up
| in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all.
|
| And if you really need some piece of information in the
| Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search
| for it, all you need is an email.
|
| I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly
| prefer it to forums or IRC.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| As far as I can remember, I've never been able to use Discord
| at all as a guest through any device on my home network (always
| demands verification; never used Discord before through the
| ISP, and undoubtedly my dynamic IP has changed many times
| throughout).
|
| This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid'
| screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for
| which the help link doesn't even include the case of being
| seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord.
|
| Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-
| source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| Perhaps Matrix is an option as well.
|
| It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed
| by search engines if you set the discussions to public
|
| Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split
| the community.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my
| experience. The way the discussion is structured changes
| completely when someone on the other end responds instantly,
| and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute
| discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were
| looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening
| in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and
| starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge.
|
| There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an
| obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter
| chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.
|
| Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages
| and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link
| you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the
| highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the
| static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches
| and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere
| in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to
| scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making
| "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by
| providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even
| worse.
|
| I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity.
| It's a better experience for the person writing the question
| or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability
| and knowledge transfer, though.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's
| logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be
| that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source
| should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day
| that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the
| _only_ thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an
| archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years
| later.
| password4321 wrote:
| https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
|
| Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this
| though.
| pas wrote:
| But that IRC archive was written by a bot, not the server(s).
| Adding a bot to Discord is just as easy.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Seems not so easy as the oss project owners I asked to do
| that had no idea how. That would make life better indeed.
| Coding_Cat wrote:
| Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or
| less, large bots need approval) can see every message
| event in every channel they have access to using the
| websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's
| pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API.
|
| From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just
| need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which
| already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits &
| deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool
| (https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off
| channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure
| too.
| throwaway3snao wrote:
| > If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym)
| is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid
| questions
|
| One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your
| data and metadata forever.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and
| potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys
| server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit
| will get leaked anyway
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'm a discord user. I'm in several servers. I'm even Nitro.
|
| ...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask
| questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git
| platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not
| use the software.
|
| Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to
| join is very low.
|
| Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join
| with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies
| you for every message until you tune it down.
| sanjiwatsuki wrote:
| Although there are certainly some servers with gauntlets to
| join, I think that's only for some really huge ones that have
| scaling issues.
|
| I have no issue joining a Discord for technical assistance.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| I guess it is a personal preference then. I don't think any
| project will stop you from posting questions on GitHub in
| their issues. I for one will happily answer questions in
| discord or GitHub issues. I don't know about others.
| Hayarotle wrote:
| The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question
| used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a
| shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat
| coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads
| (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a
| wiki).
|
| Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a
| different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you
| are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums.
|
| Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a
| custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but
| was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most
| larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this
| property by requiring some sort of authentication for new
| members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of
| the channels.
|
| Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-
| box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box,
| discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on
| the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages;
| like social media, it nudges you into using a single account
| for all your different interests. I can see how this
| combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and
| I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards
| and IRC.
| tester756 wrote:
| >shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat
| coexisted with search engine-indexed,
|
| How would that even work?
|
| google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it
| and have to scroll forever?
| CyberShadow wrote:
| Have you tried GitHub Discussions? They even have a Q&A mode
| for your own mini StackOverflow.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion.
|
| Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I
| do agree with he author's point that having too many
| communication channels split the people unnecessarily.
| keb_ wrote:
| Gitter is better for your use-case. The search just sucks, but
| there are archive pages. You can also use a Matrix client to
| access Gitters.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| It's a real shame GitLab bought Gitter just to let it rot.
| born-jre wrote:
| i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot
| that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question
| that might be useful for broader people you could do something
| like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation
| to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also
| anonymize usernames.
| hedgewitch wrote:
| > There are a few things that are repeated questions
|
| I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the
| case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical
| applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text,
| "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download
| button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag
| and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup
| procedure the application entails.
|
| It's an issue with the people, not the format.
|
| EDIT:
|
| > If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym)
| is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid
| questions.
|
| Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent.
|
| For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example,
| see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said
| something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about
| how the things you say are going to stay up there forever."
|
| Social networks do a _really_ good job of making permanence
| feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know
| better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that
| people don 't really think about or care whether someone will
| judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.
| 634643637387 wrote:
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Discord is perfect, the only problem is backing up that
| information. I'm on several Rust discords. There's several orders
| of magnitude more discussion on there than the rust subreddit. If
| in 5 years the admins abandon one of the discords, and it gets
| taken over by trolls, and Discord is forced to ban the group,
| will that information vanish into the ether? Currently the answer
| is yes. But ideally there would be some way to archive channels
| to your own site or something.
| trinovantes wrote:
| It's going to get worse with discussion channels (in testing).
| Discord will soon replace niche subreddits at this rate
|
| https://np.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/sknctl/discord_i...
| posix86 wrote:
| I haven't made that bad an experience with Discord. I remember
| having an issue with Svelte and simply not finding the answer
| even though I thought that should be a fairly common problem
| (disabling SSR). There were threads on Github with the same
| problem but no answer, and closed. I went to Discord to ask
| someone there, but first search for it in the chat, and lo and
| behold: It was there, white on black.
|
| Maybe I was lucky, that the problem had such a clear keyword to
| look for. But writing an extensive documentation of ypur project
| takes a lot of time, and having a place where ALL people can ask
| questions and other people can find them is a good thing (nothing
| against Svelte's docs, they're amazing). Maybe Discord could
| improve search functionality, and a clear culture of channel
| organization still has to develop
| dgellow wrote:
| If that would have been asked and resolved on a forum anyone
| using a search engine would be able to find the solution.
| Instead you have to create a discord account, install the
| client, join the server, agree to the server rules, search for
| what you want, hope you find an answer.
| dgellow wrote:
| Discord is so overwhelming. I tried a few month ago to join
| programming related servers, and holy shit, what a stressful
| experience! I'm not that old school but compared to forums it is
| just so hard to follow what is happening with all those
| notifications and discussions happening at the same time.
|
| After muting all servers and channels, and only joining small-ish
| communities things started to become better but I cannot imagine
| keeping the client open and try to follow what is happening, it
| feels like a full time job.
|
| Of course I may be using the tool incorrectly, people seem to
| appreciate IRC and I never understood what was attractive about
| it, outside of small groups.
| boxed wrote:
| Talking is a black hole for information by this metric.
|
| I guess the author wants us to stop talking to each other too?
| xigoi wrote:
| How many open-source projects use talking in person as their
| primary form of support?
| boxed wrote:
| Probably more common than you'd think :)
|
| It was the primary form of support for iommi for many years
| before we got anyone outside our company to try it :)
| axegon_ wrote:
| Discord is by no means perfect but we have to give it credit
| where it's due: It is a very fast and responsive platform. I am
| currently in "servers", as they call them, with thousands of
| users and it feels just as effortless as one on one chats. It
| also offers a great deal of separation as well as public options.
| Comparing it to slack for instance, where every chat is almost an
| independent ecosystem. and using more than one is always
| additional effort. Video calls on the other hand are second to
| none. The only true criticism I have is the fact that all file
| uploads are entirely public with no restrictions whatsoever and
| as far as I can tell, there is no option to change that. Still,
| it is my top choice of all the proprietary options by a
| considerable margin.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes - I think there is some general confusion about the different
| applications.
|
| I personally think its fine that discord is a black hole. Its a
| voice and text chat program. Its great for instant research,
| instant interaction - its not for the detailed and considered
| laying out of some idea. Forums or blogs would be better for
| that.
|
| PS Dark corporate spy note: I'm not saying btw, that Discord is
| literally a black hole. I'm sure they keep and measure everything
| and have their AI bots running over the data. The data will also
| be re-worked by MS or whoever eventually buys them in future, to
| build even better profiles of us.
| danShumway wrote:
| Separate from the more fundamental problem of using chat apps in
| general as a wiki, Element/Matrix's concept of spaces are a big
| step forward as a Discord replacement for me. They're a lot like
| Discord servers, but they can be nested, and you can add rooms to
| multiple spaces, and they generally seem to be a lot more
| lightweight.
|
| There's still a ton of polish issues to work out, but stuff I
| really like that I wish I had in Discord:
|
| - I can dictate which rooms in a space get surfaced by default.
| When I join Discord servers, it's really chaotic, you have this
| giant list of rooms you're suddenly subscribed to, and it's
| overwhelming. With spaces you're not auto-subbed to every single
| room in the space. There's even a way to search for rooms in a
| space, which would be a feature I would want in Discord if
| Discord didn't just throw every room on a server at your face in
| one list.
|
| - I can import spaces into other spaces, so I can make a public
| space that's a composite of other public spaces.
|
| - Nested spaces can be used for organization, they kind of act
| like folders. Discord sort of has this concept with sections, but
| Discord sections are only 1 level deep, and spaces can be nested
| multiple levels.
|
| - The first thing I always have to do when joining a Discord
| server is update notification settings for all of the rooms I'm
| in, and Spaces has that problem less (although I wish there were
| easier ways to set notification settings for an entire space).
|
| - A giant feature that I wish existed in Discord is that rooms
| can be shared across spaces. So I can have a private space in
| Element that is only for me that I use for organizing a set of
| rooms I've joined across multiple spaces. Say that I've joined
| tech support channels for multiple projects. I can have one space
| that lists out all of the individual support rooms.
|
| - And obviously, Element spaces/rooms can optionally be
| previewable without forcing the user to join, which Discord still
| refuses to do.
|
| ----
|
| I'm not saying that everyone should just drop Discord right now
| and that Element is better in every way, more just pointing out
| that the direction Element is moving is really positive. It's a
| little bit exciting to see a UX effort in Element that (while
| still very much in-progress and in-development) is not just
| competitive with Discord, but better than Discord's system on its
| fundamentals. I haven't seen spaces get talked about that much,
| and they're a massive UX improvement, one of the most exciting
| non-protocol/infrastructure changes to Element I've seen in a
| while.
|
| Of course Element doesn't fix the problem that Element/Discord
| are _messaging_ apps, not wiki platforms, and they 're not going
| to get indexed by Google. But at least its a bit less of a black
| hole, even if I wouldn't advise replacing your wiki with it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What's the alternative? Matrix or something?
|
| It's weird that people have gotten so down on the concept of p2p
| and all in on federated services. To me it's so obvious that p2p
| systems have a huge advantage as far as adoption possibilities.
|
| Maybe what we need is something like Web gateways for p2p
| services.
|
| Have some ideas about a distributed live forum that uses webrtc
| and IPFS or something but since it's such an interesting idea to
| me and also not fully formed that usually means other people will
| hate it with passion and bury the comment.. making it a total
| waste of time to try to develop or explain the idea.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Discord is the open source equivalent of companies replacing
| customer service call centers with a phone menu "assistant". It
| saves time and resources for the maintainers to just say "check
| the discord!"
| canyonero wrote:
| I agree with this statement and am disheartened that the solution
| for communities (in particular developer communities) that is now
| winning is Discord. This is however not a new problem. Both Slack
| and Twitter are also black holes of information by design. Lots
| of interesting conversation, but nearly impossible to discover
| externally.
|
| I think community maintainers are choosing it because it has the
| best moderation tools and community management tools compared to
| the alternatives.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an
| issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the
| discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron.
|
| Shouldn't this problem solve itself? At some point, a question
| gets asked often enough that people realize they should document
| it somewhere, and lo and behold, Github issues are perfect for
| that.
| lux wrote:
| We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving
| away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally
| shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a
| community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to
| care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The
| users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like
| the same reason teams use Slack for the perceived relatively
| friction-free ability to post, despite its equivalent issues for
| business communication.
|
| It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our
| problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and
| expect a response. Frustrating.
|
| It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer"
| feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to
| create the great user experience we expect them to.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is
| our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question
| and expect a response. Frustrating.
|
| If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an
| answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be
| selling a product.
|
| If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then
| I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an
| answer. Users will ask for answers in the most convenient way
| (asking on discord) in hopes of getting a quick answer. This
| does NOT mean that they will not fall back to googling if that
| avenue fails.
| lux wrote:
| You're totally right and of course we help away. Reducing the
| steps to be able to ask a question is also a better user
| experience, hence ditching the forum. Give users what they
| want, including timely responses.
|
| But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's
| ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to
| do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a
| forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions
| way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the
| friction.
|
| I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually
| improving documentation as common questions emerge and a
| "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response,
| which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some
| replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the
| development of new tutorials, etc.
|
| Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved
| replies and voted :)
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/community/posts/3600483...
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| A few times when trying to search for something I've stumbled
| upon public logs from irc bots and found the answer there. It
| would be nice if discord had the ability to do this for
| communities that are centered around some software.
| karterk wrote:
| At Typesense [1] we face a similar problem with Slack. Slack has
| been great for us in terms of quickly discussing an issue but the
| free plan limits the searches to last 10K messages. We would be
| happy to pay for it but the current pricing model is just not
| catered towards large communities where users interact in
| periodic bursts. Most communities will not be able to afford it.
|
| I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it
| searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that
| it's against Slack's ToS.
|
| If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be
| happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of
| Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.
|
| 1: https://github.com/typesense/typesense
| steelstraw wrote:
| The younger generation may see that as a feature given our cancel
| culture climate?
| pizza wrote:
| What's really great about discord is how I keep running into a
| situation where I have random pings from the hundreds of server
| chatrooms I may or may not be a part of, with no easy way of
| telling where they came from. Great.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I dont really see the benefit of having a dedicated forum for
| everything, sure that used to be the norm and arguably you can
| search forums easier, but stickied comments work perfectly fine
| on discord and you can search the comment history.
| nootropicat wrote:
| I think this is a weird consequence of social media - a local
| maximum.
|
| - facebook, digg/reddit and twitter kill independent forums. They
| are 'good enough' mostly for friction reasons that people slowly
| move there. I think the twitter part is unappreciated - in the
| past when you had one simple issue, you had to register to
| communicate it. Now people are likely to tag the profile on
| twitter with their problem. Sometimes these people remained, now
| that user acquisition channel is lost.
|
| - they suck at creating communities (I think intentionally), so
| people don't contribute as much.
|
| - discord is a chat app with flawless ui. As a chat app it's
| great at building communities due to frequent interactions and
| instant feedback. This means most active people do everything
| there, same people who would have 1000+ posts on old style
| forums.
|
| The tl;dr is that forums are best at preserving information for
| outside access, but are inferior in making new people join and
| contribute, which means they are never going to proliferate
| again. The old optimal balance of chat vs forum is never going to
| return.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Discord is the modern IRC. And at least you can see history
| there, unlike with IRC where it is just gone if your client
| fails.
| tovej wrote:
| IRC is almost always logged, and if you need to log things
| yourself, you can use a bouncer or set up a server.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And if your bouncer or server fails? Where do you get the
| history then?
| morceauxdebois wrote:
| What if the discord servers fail and your history is lost?
| gs17 wrote:
| Or if Discord decides storing unlimited history isn't
| something they want to provide to everyone for free
| anymore.
| Fnoord wrote:
| You put in a search engine network_name channel_name and
| hope someone else logged. If its a technical channel,
| someone almost always did and also did share it.
| aliswe wrote:
| no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is
| more popular than IRC.
|
| Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects,
| like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server
| but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems,
| audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis
| will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets
| from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?)
| scheme...
| [deleted]
| e2le wrote:
| At least with IRC, many would run bots which made channel logs
| available somewhere that could be indexed by a search engine.
| Doing the same with Discord will earn you a TOS ban.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| IIRC, scripting your own account is bannable, so you can't
| download the contents of servers you join. But I don't think
| there's any prohibition on inviting a proper bot account to
| download messages, provided you have admin access on the
| server to do so.
| leni536 wrote:
| Discord search is unfortunately garbage in my experience, so
| it's almost like not having history.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Several people in this thread have complained about it, but I
| haven't had any issues.
|
| It's O(log n), it has fuzzy search (e.g. noun/verb forms the
| same word), and you can add qualifiers like
| `from:Author#1234`.
|
| I can normally join a Discord server for a project, search
| for a keyword, find someone else with the same question, and
| read the chat log from that point in time.
| Kiro wrote:
| What's your issue with it? I'm surprised how well it works,
| how you can search for something and quickly jump to the
| context.
| urthor wrote:
| Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of
| information.
|
| Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great
| effort was required to publish them for search crawlers.
| Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.
|
| Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately.
| Private conversations? Remember those.
|
| The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is
| that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
|
| There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off
| an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the
| closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to
| administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.
|
| In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion
| platform, make one.
|
| And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's
| lots of unattractive platforms already.
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| GitHub works great for me - with Discussions tab being very
| useful e.g. https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/
|
| Also helps that you can publish and serve static HTML/JS files
| in the same place. With video support added in markdown I have
| little else to wish for.
| ayushnix wrote:
| > The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy
| to use platform.
|
| It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few
| reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and
| this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium
| instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a
| bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention
| that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to
| create third party clients.
|
| Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A
| Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with
| spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other
| scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of
| such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends
| to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it,
| you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of
| your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid
| your servers.
|
| Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've
| sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either
| ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies,
| privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
|
| You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord.
| Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers
| with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A
| public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private
| conversation with your buddies.
| justinwp wrote:
| My developer relations team uses Discord. For us, it is more
| about strategy and design questions that are often tied to the
| customer's particular use case. If there are common themes or
| challenges, we will turn it into a blog post, video, docs, etc to
| capture it.
|
| Other discussions such as "why doesn't this code work?" or "this
| behavior seems unexpected" we redirect to StackOverflow and
| GitHub. Discord also serves as an activity hub for us as we have
| channels with automated feeds from blogs, youtube, stackoverflow,
| github, twitter, etc all located in a single location.
|
| This pattern seems to be working for us.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I posted an Ask HN:[0] about this a few days ago but somehow it
| did not turn up in Ask HN. Probably my mistake. Still, this is a
| bad issue imho. I like discord and use it a lot, but I would
| just, at least for the open source projects I follow and work
| with , that everything is dumped in HTML so that it's indexed.
| When working on tech it's so valuable to be able to find
| architectural choices and solutions to problems later on; when
| they are solely in discord, they are hard/impossible to find now,
| let alone in a few years.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240984
| born-jre wrote:
| i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if
| someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for
| broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then
| it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only
| seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize
| usernames.
| kreetx wrote:
| The UI of Discord is really fast, plus it does voice and video.
| The problem with all the other chats is that they look
| (relatively) ugly, including knockout and zulip.
|
| Perhaps if Discord had an option to expose chat histories as
| regular crawlable web then this problem would go away.
| haunter wrote:
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